Again, however, appearances may be deceptive. The idea that com-
mon gods result in a common identity seems fairly plausible because it
is based on a correlation. Many groups that have a fairly strong sense
of being, precisely, groups apart from the others, alsouse religious
norms and practices as signals of that common identity. Because sev-
eral factors are present at the same time, it is difficult to figure out
their exact relations. Note that some of the examples described here
seem to go against the simplistic link between common gods and a
community. The Buid's main religious activity, as I said, is a form of
mediumship that is found in many neighboring groups as well. But the
[286] Buid are a distinctive group, they see no particular connection to or
kinship with other practitioners of this form of religion.
Saying that having the same gods creates solidarity just begs the
question of why and how religious concepts can have such an effect.
Why should you feel closer to someone who happens to have similar
supernatural concepts? In other words, although common gods and
spirits are not really necessary for group cohesion, why are they used
for that purpose?
Signals of group membership, especially of ethnicgroup member-
ship, are very diverse although not indefinitely variable. They consist
in features that are both easy to distinguish and difficult to fake, such
as residence in a particular territory, mode of subsistence, language,
accent, dietary preferences or acceptance of gruesome rituals. Now
although there may be great emotional import in these signals, they
are nonetheless construed as nothing more than symptoms orindices of
an underlying set of qualities. People say that they all share the bones
of their ancestors, that they have common blood, etc. All these
metaphors express what psychologists would call an essentialist
assumption. That is, one assumes that there must be something in
common between all the individuals concerned, though one may have
only vague or metaphorical understandings of what that thing actually
consists of. Members of an ethnic group defined along such lines can
readily imagine the improbable yet possible case of an outsider who
would manage to speak the language with the right accent, prefer the
right food and in general display all the signs of membership—yet
would of course remain an outsider. In other words, membership is
defined in terms similar to what I described in Chapter 3 as a basis for
our understanding of animal species.^12
Inference systems have particular input conditions; that is, they get
activated whenever information with a certain format is presented.
RELIGION EXPLAINED